'Around the World in 80 Ways' -- counting ostriches

Jacqueline CutlerZap2It

Sure, you can board a boat or a plane to get around the world, but where's the challenge?

In History's "Around the World in 80 Ways," airing Sundays, Robert "Boston Rob" Mariano ("Survivor," "The Amazing Race") and Dennis Anderson, a monster truck expert, use 80 ways to circumnavigate the globe.

It seems that after exhausting the usual air, land and water modes of transit, not much would remain. But, Mariano says, "How many animals are there?"

They travel by ostrich, elephant, donkey and water buffalo. Both men say the one animal that frightens them is the hippo. They had reason to be afraid. In Botswana, they were on a river in a canoe with an engine that broke. Though Anderson managed to get it going, it was just as a hippo charged.

"Dude, it started coming at us," Mariano, in his thick Boston accent, reminds Anderson as they chat in a hotel room.

"It probably looks like it was staged," Anderson says. "I could almost feel him coming at us."

Their adventures had them driving a Ferrari, which was the fastest vehicle, flying a World War II fighter jet and riding on a 1912 boat, the sort of which was in "The African Queen."

When they were interviewed over the summer, they had just returned from the trip that took them from outside Los Angeles to South America, where they went to Peru and Brazil. From there it was on to Africa, and they were in Namibia, Botswana, Zambia, Tanzania and Zanzibar. In the Mideast, they traveled through the United Arab Emirates, and then came to India, where they stopped in Mumbai, New Delhi and Calcutta, before heading to Bangkok and back to San Francisco.

The two men were together 24 hours a day for 10 weeks.

"There were times I didn't want to hear him say another word," Anderson says.

As for his next stop? "I want to go home and see my family," Mariano says.